L.M. Montgomery comes to life in deftly penned diaries

By ELIZABETH PATTERSONPublished December 10, 2012 - 9:41pm

Growing up in Atlantic Canada, it’s hard to escape the presence of Prince Edward Island’s favorite redhead, Anne of Green Gables. For those who have grown up and still want to read more, Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston have given us The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The P.E.I. Years, 1889-1900.

At first, the idea of reading the personal diaries of someone long dead seems a little intrusive, and frankly, rather boring.

But L.M. Montgomery was not a boring person and if she were a dull writer, her books wouldn’t be still devoured today by thousands of readers, mesmerized by the idea of a world that probably never existed. And just like that fantasy world, public perceptions of Montgomery are also probably off-base from the real woman. Waterston says the journals show a complex person.

“We were delighted with the exuberance, the sheer fun and folly of the earlier entries; we relished the later meditations on the beauties she saw in her Island environment, and the stimulus she found in books,” Waterston says in an email interview.

“We found so much that enriched our sense of how a novelist works her own experiences into rich fictional versions — and were astonished to find such a rich record of experiences and ideas that she never used in her novels, but kept to the privacy of her diary: sexual passion, and the doldrums of depression and disappointment, for example.”

Rubio and Waterston initially edited and published the work 30 years ago but decided to re-release the book because of changes in the publishing industry. “We decided that now is a good time to give readers the complete text of the complex journals.

All the photographs that Montgomery inserted into her manuscript are now embedded in the text, creating a multi-media impact — and the result is beautiful.”

While Rubio controlled the text of the journals by transcribing from the handwritten ledgers, Waterston did the explanatory footnotes and a first draft of the introduction, although she says by the time they arrived at the finished product, “it is hard to tell who wrote what in our introductory comments.”

Waterston says she and Rubio are pleased with the public’s reaction to the work and have been working on the second half of the project, which they expect to have released by next summer.

“We ourselves felt energized as we move into the complex life of the diarist and enjoyed the brilliance of her writing, and we believe other readers will feel the same way.”